When Ester Summerson ventured out after months of a completely confining illness from smallpox; a deadly disease as it was then before Edward Jenner's discovery of the vaccine, she spoke for Dickens and as well, for all of us, about the realized world around us. As she looked from the carriage for the first time in months, she said, "I found every breath of air, and every scent and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet . This was my first gain from my illness." To emerge into the light from whatever dark night of the soul that you have been confined to is a revelation that the ordinary is truly extraordinary. To merge your streams of consciousness and unconsciousness with the streams of Mother Nature, seen and unseen, heard and felt and smelled! The profound, once experienced, is enough! To expect it again is greedy. To have it always would render it powerless. The lasting gain is in the serenity.

Years ago, while working in the orchard pruning apple trees and sitting by a tree trunk taking a breather, I saw Gramps, the pianist's father, walking up the road beside the orchard on my right. He was walking slowly because he was breathless from an advanced lung cancer, but he was still in good spirit and mining all he could from the seams of his remaining life. We could have set music of some sort to the cadence and amplitude of his gait and the surreptitious appearance he presented. He had emerged from the kitchen door on the right of the cottage, closed it quietly and had a location in mind. As I watched and thought about him and his life ebbing after so many years I still saw spirit and desire. I knew he was going up the road for a smoke. There was a flash of movement on the path on the left side of the cottage where the sliding door opened and closed silently and 14 year old Ruth, my daughter emerged, ostensibly unnoticed and quietly walked up the pathway on the left side of the orchard, clearly on her way to have a forbidden smoke. She had spirit and desire and was going to try everything, childhood ebbing. As they both proceeded a pace , unknown to one another and known by me in silence, I saw this as a drama, a point and counterpoint, simply defined as interdependent harmonically, yet independent in rhythm and contour. Three players engaged in a small rhythm of life.